The homology of moduli spaces of 4-manifolds may be infinitely generated

For a simply-connected closed manifold X of $\dim X \neq 4$ , the mapping class group $\pi _0(\mathrm {Diff}(X))$ is known to be finitely generated. We prove that analogous finite generation fails in dimension 4. Namely, we show that there exist simply-connected closed smooth 4-manifold...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hokuto Konno
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press 2024-01-01
Series:Forum of Mathematics, Pi
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S205050862400026X/type/journal_article
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:For a simply-connected closed manifold X of $\dim X \neq 4$ , the mapping class group $\pi _0(\mathrm {Diff}(X))$ is known to be finitely generated. We prove that analogous finite generation fails in dimension 4. Namely, we show that there exist simply-connected closed smooth 4-manifolds whose mapping class groups are not finitely generated. More generally, for each $k>0$ , we prove that there are simply-connected closed smooth 4-manifolds X for which $H_k(B\mathrm {Diff}(X);\mathbb {Z})$ are not finitely generated. The infinitely generated subgroup of $H_k(B\mathrm {Diff}(X);\mathbb {Z})$ which we detect are topologically trivial, and unstable under the connected sum of $S^2 \times S^2$ . These results are proven by constructing and computing an infinite family of characteristic classes using Seiberg–Witten theory.
ISSN:2050-5086